The Attic serves up Cajun food to dig into in Long Beach

The Attic

Rating: 3 stars.

Address: 3441 E. Broadway, Long Beach.

Cuisine: A bit of old New Orleans filtered through a lot of California and Long Beach, situated in a venerable Craftsman house that’s been lovingly restored and turned into one of the coziest eateries in town, with dining inside and out.

The cooking at The Attic, which isn’t so much in an attic as it is in a Long Beach house that has an attic, is delicious, indulgent, joyous, Cajun-inflected and best for those who aren’t on a diet. This is the sort of food you want to enjoy, without figuring out the calorie, cholesterol and sodium counts in your head. This is food to dig into, without hesitation. (You can always go back to lettuce and cottage cheese tomorrow.)

Consider, for instance, the appetizer sampler. It consists of Devilish Eggs (deviled eggs topped with roasted corn and poblano chili relish), jalapeno stuffed with a crab and cream cheese mix and wrapped in bacon, Mac ’n’ Cheetos (which is just what it sounds like, only more so), and fried green tomatoes.

The dishes are crazy good, insanely fun to eat and also completely over-the-top — especially the mac ’n’ cheese creation, in which macaroni is mixed with cheddar, mozzarella and jack cheeses, then further tricked up with bacon and scallions and finally topped with the sort of red-spiced Cheetos that leave cheese dust on everything for a mile around. It’s crunchy, soft, sweet, salty and spicy for a bestiary of different mouth sensations, all packed into each bite. Even in a world where mac ’n’ cheese is done just about every way it can be done, this one stands out from the crowd. All it’s missing is marshmallows to push it totally round the bend.

Speaking of round the bend, let us consider the Meaty Man Bloody Mary. It’s a fine Bloody Mary, topped with stuffed olives, shrimp and a pulled pork slider. With a cornichon on top. It’s not so much a drink, as it is a meal in a glass. And it’s just one of the many Bloody Mary options at The Attic. If you want, you can get your olives stuffed with Slim Jim or made with tequila, with a beer chaser. Or you can replace the slider with a baby back rib hanging atop the Bloody.

The thing with the cooking at The Attic is that as zany as it can be, it’s always grounded in reality. Perhaps a strange reality, but reality nonetheless. The Mac ’n’ Cheetos are crazy good. Aside from the bells and whistles, the Bloody Mary is also a fine Bloody Mary. Even those Devilish Eggs are “devilishly” good; for my taste, you can’t make deviled eggs spicy enough.

Even the short rib poutine is one of the few versions of a French-Canadian favorite that I find even vaguely edible. In case you’re not familiar with poutine, it’s one of those regional obsessions, built out of french fries, topped with cheese curds and a gravy thick enough to use as spackle. In this case, braised short ribs in a red wine sauce replace the ghastly gravy and the cheese curds are mozzarella, a bit more delicate in flavor than the usual thicker cheddar curds. Like the Mac ’n’ Cheetos, it’s not something I’d opt to eat everyday, but now and then? Sure. Why not?

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There’s so much more on the menu that makes me want to come back, again and again.

Breakfast at The Attic may be the most calorically dense meal served at the restaurant, so be ready to run some laps during the week. There’s an FGT Benedict with FGT standing for fried green tomatoes. There’s an alligator andouille sausage (yup, tastes like chicken) atop an English muffin with poached eggs and a well-spiced Cajun hollandaise sauce. There’s even a Chicken Fried Steak Benedict on a buttermilk biscuit with country gravy that must be well over 1,000 calories.

There’s a Boxty Benedict, made with the Irish standard called boxty (potato cakes) served with corned beef and eggs on an English muffin, with a hollandaise flavored with Guinness and mustard. The Brat Pack is a pair of beer-braised bratwursts with eggs and Creole mustard. This is the sort of breakfast that makes me want to go take a nap before lunch.

But even after that nap, I would plan to get up in time for the Crabby Patty (just like in “SpongeBob SquarePants,” only real). It’s not only pretty wonderful, but comes topped with a fine, rough-cut slaw on a sweet onion bun. (Squidward would be proud, though he probably couldn’t make heads nor tails of the buffalo burger called My Boy Bleu seasoned with Cajun spices, topped with blue cheese, fried shallots and candied cayenne bacon, on onion brioche).

Further down the menu, there’s chicken pot pie, buttermilk fried chicken, even a fine farmers market salad — dishes for people who want a proper feed. Though they can always go south with a Bloody Mary made with pickle juice and pepper jack cubes. And no, I am not making that up.